This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the disclosure. Accordingly, these statements are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is or is not prior art.
In this disclosure we mean conductive to mean electrically conductive unless otherwise specified. Highly deformable soft machines require equally deformable soft electronics for sensing and power transport. Previously developed soft electronics utilize polymer based front-side electrode materials that provide advantages in flexibility, but have much higher sheet resistances than metals, leading to significant losses. In addition, conductive polymers are not as stretchable as most materials employed in soft robotic applications, significantly reducing their potential uses.
Metallic nanoparticles (MNPs) have been used since ancient times. Metallic nanoparticles can be formed from a metal or an alloy. Recent advancements in science and engineering have demonstrated the utilization of MNPs for applications in a broad array of fields, including optics, medicine, memory, and semiconductors. Many current applications require a sintering step in order to coalesce the deposited MNPs to enable functionality; whether it be thermal, photonic, plasmatic, or chemical in nature. Although ambient and local temperatures of current sintering methods are significantly lower than the melting point of the bulk materials, difficulties, such as damage to polymers at sintering temperatures, can still arise when integrating MNPs into functional devices with other materials such as chemically or thermally sensitive polymers.
Thus there is an unmet need for materials and methods that can produce high-conductivity nanoparticle patterns on sub stares that are stretchable, without the limitations of the conductive polymers used in previously developed technologies. Further it is desirable that such methods and materials lend themselves to scalable manufacturing processes and are capable of enabling fabrication of electronic devices to serve as platforms for soft robotics, safe human-machine interaction, active orthotics, wearable interfaces, or assistive medical devices for motion aid, prolonged endurance, and health monitoring.